Elon Musk, Welfare King!

03/03/21 • 61 min

The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is known for creating bold new companies such as PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, championing liberating technologies like Bitcoin, and hyping visionary plans to colonize Mars.

But with a net worth of around $200 billion, he's not just the planet's richest person. He's one of its biggest welfare recipients, report Lisa Conyers and Phil Harvey, authors of Welfare for the Rich: How Your Tax Dollars End Up in Millionaires' Pockets—And What You Can do About It. By 2015, they write, companies led by Musk had gotten billions of dollars in subsidies, tax breaks, and other handouts. New York state even shelled out $750 million to build a solar panel factory for Musk's Solar City operation and said the company would pay no property taxes for a decade, saving another $260 million.

Musk is not alone say Conyers, a veteran journalist, and Harvey, a successful businessman who donates to many libertarian organizations, including Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast. There are literally thousands of other immensely rich people who are constantly bilking governments at all levels for special perks, carve-outs, and handouts paid for by middle-class and poor people.

In exhaustively documented and perpetually enraging prose, Conyers and Harvey show how millionaire "farmers," billionaire team owners, and filthy rich oil-and-gas-and-wind-power barons lobby Congress, rewrite zoning laws, and plunder the public fisc like it's a bodily function. They also outline realistic and effective ways to fight back and level a playing field that benefits the people who need the least help from government.

The post Elon Musk, Welfare King! appeared first on Reason.com.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is known for creating bold new companies such as PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, championing liberating technologies like Bitcoin, and hyping visionary plans to colonize Mars.

The post Elon Musk, Welfare King! appeared first on Reason.com.

Previous Episode

Jason Riley: Thomas Sowell's Unique Insights on Race, Economics, and Politics

Thomas Sowell is one of the most influential economists, syndicated columnists, and social critics of the past half-century, having authored provocative, best-selling books on everything from race relations to childhood development to, most recently, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. His masterworks include Knowledge and Decisions, which uses Friedrich Hayek's insights about distributed information to explain both how markets work and why intellectuals disdain markets; A Conflict of Visions, which explores the ideological origins of political struggles; and Basic Economics, a best-selling primer now in its fifth edition.

Sowell's inspiring life—he was born black and poor in North Carolina in 1930 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago at the age of 38—and expansive work are now the subjects of a new documentary, Common Sense in a Senseless World (watch here) and a forthcoming biography titled Maverick.

Nick Gillespie speaks with Jason L. Riley, the author of the film and the biography, about why even at age 90, Sowell is more relevant today than ever. A fellow at The Manhattan Institute and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Riley tells me that Sowell's empirically driven research and his fearless engagement with even the most controversial topics are exactly what our world needs more of.

The post Jason Riley: Thomas Sowell's Unique Insights on Race, Economics, and Politics appeared first on Reason.com.

Next Episode

Peter Suderman: The $1.9 Trillion American Rescue Plan Has Almost Nothing To Do With Covid

The American Rescue Plan Act is hurtling toward final passage, but only a few percentage points of its massive $1.9 trillion price tag is specifically geared toward, you know, addressing the pandemic. How little? House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) says just 9 percent of it goes "directly to toward Covid-19 relief." The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget puts the number even lower, declaring, "Only about 1 percent of the entire package goes toward COVID-19 vaccines, and 5 percent is truly focused on public health needs surrounding the pandemic."

Most of it is instead a pre-existing Democratic Party wishlist of increased spending on virtually every aspect of government, including bigger unemployment benefits, even more money for schools, a gigantic child tax credit, and subsidies for Obamacare insurance policies that would phase out only at a household income of more than $580,000. This legislation comes on the heels of the $4 trillion in coronavirus-related spending passed last year.

Peter Suderman, features editor at Reason, joins Nick Gillespie to discuss his cover story in the new issue of the magazine, which is titled "Josh Hawley's Toxic Populism," a deep dive into the anti-libertarian platform of the Missouri senator who is one of the Republican Party's rising stars. They also walk through the nearly $2 trillion of new spending—passed along strict party lines—that is about to be signed into law by President Joe Biden.

The post Peter Suderman: The $1.9 Trillion American Rescue Plan Has Almost Nothing To Do With Covid appeared first on Reason.com.